The Painted Face

The Painted Face captivatingly stares out at the viewer surrounded by a vulture headdress, circlet, and a blue and yellow striped wig. A scarab beetle with a sun disc sit just above the forehead and just below the lappets of the blue and yellow striped wig is a faint inscription with a recumbent jackal holding a flail and a pair of hands, grasping at two loops. The Painted Face was the name given to the Coffin Board of a Woman (Michael C. Carlos Museum, 2018.010.410) for the Fall 2020 semester while we explored what this object was, how it was made, who may have owned, and where it came from, through close-looking, technical analyses and researching comparanda.

The Painted Face's fundamental structure consists of four wooden planks. On top of these four wooden planks is a modelled wig and headdress, and a carved face. From x-ray images, we can see that the wig lappets appear brighter and in each side of the wig there are two darker objects, which are planks of wood.

From the parts where there is paint loss, we know the wig and headdress was modelled from a mixture of clay and organic material, such as straw. This mud mixture shows up as the brighter areas on the x-ray image, as opposed to the darker areas which show the wood. The rim of the coffin was similarly modelled out of small pieces of wood and clay.

Unlike the wig, headdress and the rim of the coffin, we were able to deduce from the x-ray images that her face is carved from a single piece of wood. This conclusion was also confirmed by close looking at areas of paint loss on the nose which reveal the wood below. The face is likely attached to the coffin lid boards by dowel pins; however, because of the mass of the headdress and wig, the pins were not visible around the face. The coffin lid boards were very visibly held together with dowel pins. As shown in this X-ray (left), the holes for the dowel pins are much longer than the pins, ensuring that they would not have been visible. Wood was a very precious commodity in Egypt and with the layer of paint and mud modelling over the joints, this coffin lid may have looked like it was carved from a single piece of wood, and thus a very valuable item.

A variety of pigments were used to decorate the Painted Face and we were able to identify all the visible pigments through several techniques: multi-band imaging, X-ray Fluorescence Spectroscopy (XRF), Infrared Spectroscopy and Light Microscopy (PLM). The pigments, key elements identified and what techniques helped to identify them are summarised in the table below.

Several of the pigments' compositions were confirmed using several techniques and as such we are fairly confident in our identified pigments.

Blue is found extensively across the wig and headdress of the Painted Face. As a pigment, it is incredibly hard to get blue naturally. One option would have been grinding up lapis lazuli, a rare, expensive mineral, sourced from Northern Afghanistan, but this would have produced unsatisfactory results of a chalky blue (Corcoran, 2016, p.49). So, ancient Egyptians created the first synthetic pigment in the form of Egyptian blue.

VIL (visible induced infrared luminescence) is an effective technique to detect Egyptian blue. Egyptian blue particles "show a very strong IR emission when excited by visible light" and luminesce strongly as a bright white whereas most other pigments show as a dark black or grey (Thiboutot, 2020). In this coffin lid, all the areas covered with blue paint luminesce brightly, as seen in the image below, confirming that Egyptian Blue was used. The XRF analysis further confirmed our findings as the elements calcium, iron, copper, and arsenic were found. The presence of calcium and copper confirms that the blue paint is Egyptian blue as it is mainly cuprorivaite with copper wollastonite, silica and glass (Lee & Quirke, 1999, p.105). 

The inscription and painted hands on the Painted Face were previously described as 'gold leaf' and, as they glint and shimmer, catching our eye to this day, gold is what we are meant to see. However, through the use of XRF technology the pigment was actually identified as yellow orpiment. Yellow orpiment when mixed with iron ochre creates a vivid golden color that can be used to invoke the image of the precious metal. While it was not uncommon for some Egyptian coffins to be decorated with gold or even completely covered in gold, the paint substitute was just as effective in representing elaborate decoration in Egyptian art. Gold was the material that Egyptian's understood their deities flesh to be made from and through objects such as coffins, deceased Egyptians identify themselves with the gods.

"strong boned, his limbs overlaid with gold, his headdress of true lapis lazuli" - description of the king as a deity in the Westcar Papyrus (trans. Lichtheim 1973-80, 1:220)

Blue was also an important colour to ancient Egyptians, it was used for the color of the Nile river and for the sky, and associated with regeneration (Baines, 2007, p.252). It could also be used to mimic lapis lazuli, which shared the same name as the colour blue in ancient Egyptian. As seen in the quote above, Lapis lazuli, similarly to gold, was used to describe aspects of the gods. It is also found in Papyrus Chester Beaty I, a love poem, the desirable attributes of a woman include "hair true lapis lazuli” (Teeter, 2000, p.151; Lichtheim 1973-80, 2:182), just like this wig on the Painted Face.

While exploring the pigments and materials used to make this coffin lid, we questioned what they could tell us about the owner. Yellow orpiment and Egyptian blue were neither rare nor expensive, having been used extensively on a wide range of mass-produced objects in antiquity. So we could not use either draw a conclusion about the user’s social status. As such we turned to look where else we could find out more about the Painted Face's original owner.

Throughout our exploration of the Painted Face, we were fascinated by questions of who this object originally belonged to and how it was used, or perhaps even reused. Usually, we would turn to the inscription in search of a name. The inscription tantalisingly reads:

"An offering which the king gives..."

This is an opening to an offering formula that may have once included the name, and even titles and familial relationships of the deceased individual that owned this coffin. However, that is now lost to us in the latter two-thirds of the coffin.

Nonetheless, we can still glean a great deal of information about the owner of this coffin lid from the Painted Face.

Firstly, the small, white face suggests that the owner of this coffin was a woman. The convention in ancient Egyptian art is to depict women with pale, either white or yellow, faces and men with a red ochre skin tone. Coffins often also have green, blue or black faces which connect the deceased with Osiris. The feathered vulture headdress adds to this designation that the Painted Face was likely a woman, even though in the Late Period, men's coffins could equally have the vulture headdress.

Secondly, she was likely interred in the 22nd to 25th Dynasties (943-655 BCE). Coffins used from the 22nd to 25th Dynasties were a marked shift from the earlier "yellow" coffins of the 21st Dynasty. The 21st Dynasty coffin lids were ornately decorated with vignettes and texts atop a gold background. In contrast, coffin lids of the 22nd to 25th Dynasties were often quite sparsely decorated. As is seen on the 22nd-25th Dynasty coffin lid from Manchester Museum (below), the decoration isolated to the face, wig, headdress, collar, hands and a single column of inscriptions. In the 26th Dynasty, there is yet another shift in coffin decoration to a comparatively large smiling face. As such, the Painted Face is dated to the 22nd to 25th Dynasties (943-655 BCE)

Thirdly, we questioned whether the coffin was reused at any point, and whether we might be looking at two or more owners, as reuse of coffins is common in the time immediately prior to the creation of the Painted Face (Cooney, 2017, p.101). So, we looked for any evidence of reuse, such as "Older plaster and paint decoration underneath the current surface[,]...older style modeling visible under a broken plastered surface... [and] markers of gender reassignment" following Cooney's framework (Cooney, 2017, p.102-103). We did not, however, find evidence of reuse in the extant section of this coffin.

Lastly, we asked where in Egypt did she come from. John Taylor in his 2009 article discusses the differences between Theban (southern) and Fayyum (northern) coffins from this period and lays out key differences between coffins from these two areas:

The Painted Face coffin lid was likely interred in the Fayyum region. The hands are represented which is rarely found on Theban coffins but common to the Fayyum. They also have bracelets on the wrists, giving a glove-like look to the hands, which is commonly found in both the painted and modelled examples of hands on coffin lids of this area. The winged headdress is also has a clearly defined scarab beetle at the centre, rather than an undefined semicircular shape found on Theban coffins (Taylor, 2009, p.387). Additionally, in the part of the coffin lid that is extant, the recumbent jackal atop the inscription both of which feature in northern coffins of this period.

The close looking, technical analyses and research that we undertook this semester have allowed us to identify that the Painted Face was interred between 943-655 BCE in the Fayyum region. It would have likely formed one of two anthropoid coffins which housed the mummiform body of a woman, either encased in lavishly decorated cartonnage or placed directly in the inner most coffin. The Painted Face may have been a part of that inner most coffin, hidden from view within an outer coffin. Regardless of the possibility that it was hidden from view, the glimmering gold colored inscription and striking red, blue, white and gold headdress and wig, framing the small white face of the Painted Face was carefully constructed and painted to look as though it was carved from one piece of wood, and was an object of great value and high status.

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